Playwrights write; directors direct; actors act; and audiences watch. But what if you are blind? To survive you must learn to operate in the dark. Such is the world of Susy Hendrix, the central protagonist in the Lab Space’s version of Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark, a play well staged and directed by Brook Hall and Ting Kao (高詩婷).
As the play opens, con men Mike Talman (Dan O’Shea) and Carlino (John Brownlie) have been lured to the apartment of Susy (Esther Veronin) and her husband Sam (Andrew Chau) when they are out. They have been brought there by a ruthless Harry Roat (Stewart Glen) to help find a heroin-stuffed doll that Sam inadvertently brought home without Susy’s knowledge. But now the doll is missing and Roat and company seek to keep Sam at a distance and con the recently blind Susy into helping them find the doll. So the game begins.
SUPERB CAST
Photo courtesy of Michael Lao
Veronin shines in the challenging lead role, where she must play to the voices of the other characters and project her own voice with a mixture of credible vulnerability and strength, so as to outwit the deadly con artists.
Matched well against Susy are three diverse heavies, the gruff Carlino, a smoother Talman and the sinister Roat who will stop at nothing to win. Susy can out-psyche Talman, but Roat is a different matter. You would not want him as a neighbor. Helping Susy is the petulant girl next door, Gloria (played in alternate performances by Angelina Chen (陳冠如) and Danielle Beuker), who at first complicates the con, but helps Suzy in the end.
Set designer Yang Chih-yi (楊之儀) makes excellent use of the venue’s flexible space to create a basement apartment, which adequately contains the action while still suggesting additional dimensions with an outside streetlight and the hint of a back bedroom.
Jenna Robinette (costumes) and Adam Dupuis (specialty props) embellish a strong 60s feeling while Anton Botes adds his intriguing and original sound track.
Staged in cooperation with the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, this is a dramatic show well worth seeing.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS